On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 06:00:04PM +0100, Sylvestre Ledru wrote: > Le samedi 20 mars 2010 à 13:49 +0100, Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt a écrit : > > Sylvestre Ledru <[email protected]> writes: > > > I am planning to upload some modifications in the way Linear Algebra > > > Libraries BLAS / LAPACK and ATLAS are handle in Debian. These libraries > > > are very used by many scientific software. > > > They didn't have many attentions during the last few years and ATLAS in > > > unstable is in a pretty bad shape (old version, plenty of bugs, hard to > > > use ...) > > > I described what I am planning to do in this wiki page: > > > http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/LinearAlgebraLibraries > > > and my changes have been tested. > > > > I have to admit that I'm a bit uncomfortable with using > > update-alternatives to switch between libary implementations. I am not > > aware of any other package doing this. > This is done with the different MPI implementation (openmpi, mpich2, > etc) > > > Is there a reason for not doing > > it on the package level, allowing users to just install the package > > fitting their needs and machine? > Yes, it does improve the performance of software based this libraries. > > > Is it really common to switch > > implementations on the same machine very often? > Yes, it is. This kind of library are used by Scilab, R or Octave. They > relies strongly on these libraries and for precision, confirmation of > the result and performances, it is common to switch between the > different implementation.
As Octave maintainer, I can confirm that switching the libraries is a routine[1]. Having a reference implementation and some highly tuned (but occasionally buggy) implementation is extremely valuable. Example of such a case on upstream's list: http://www-old.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/bug-octave/2010-January/010231.html Example in Debian: http://bugs.debian.org/570231 [1] Actually, I'm pretty sad that ATLAS isn't allowed any more to ship a configuration file in /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ . Thomas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100320192133.ga23...@atlan
